Out of dissatisfaction with the very high prices and very poor customer service of SPSS ($200 for Grad Pack v. 11, another $200 for v. 16, only to be told that the ridiculous number of bugs in v. 16 would only be solved in future releases–requiring yet another license), I’ve been thinking I should fully migrate to R but have done little in this direction. Then, I discovered this Times story about R software, complete with glowing reviews from people at big deal companies–for instance, Hal Varian, chief economist at Google.

R is a little intimidating for those not entirely at home with non-graphic computing interfaces (think DOS instead of Windows) and those who know little about statistics. For a teaching situation in a resource-strapped environment, for instance, these are not insurmountable obstacles. I would still recommend R as rather usable given a little patience for anybody who needs to do serious data analysis, and it’s even usable in almost any teaching environment that requires anything more sophisticated than Excel.

For texts, Stine used John Fox’s Applied Regression (now in a 2d edition) with his R and S Plus Companion. This text was quite helpful, and while I’m particularly enthusiastic to try new software and fairly good at learning statistics, I think everyone caught on and got a lot out of the class. More importantly than the software package, we all learned a lot about the process of data analysis using regression, and in my case, this knowledge has stayed with me even as I’ve used SPSS for the past few years.

One of the best parts about using R was that we used Fox’s “Companion to Applied Regression” (CAR) package, which was highly tailored to the kinds of work we did in the class. (See John Fox’s homepage for this and other helpful links, including a similar summer quickie class that Fox taught.) Think of it as a plugin.

SPSS charges outrageous prices for their Regression package (less so when bundled with the Grad Pack, but still), but this was free–and, in my opinion, superior on most counts. This add-on is just one of thousands available, all for free. As the Times notes, a lot of the R packages are tailored to exceptionally complicated tasks, such as econometrics and biostatistics.

This is how open source software gets popular. Once you have a critical mass of users who are invested enough to do some work to improve a package, the distributed innovation can quickly outpace the work done at the labs behind even expensive proprietary software. See Benkler’s Wealth of Networksfor more on this.

As for me, I’m seriously bunkered into SPSS for my dissertation research–it’s easier to work around the bugs for now than to re-learn an entirely new package–so I’m not making the 2-footed jump for a good bit. The article reminded me to download R, though, and I’ll get back into it very soon, I’m sure.

Interesting article at the Independent about giving away free music downloads:

The record industry has reached a strange pass when it makes more economic sense to give away an entire album than to spend the money needed to persuade people to buy it. But, when it comes to the process of downloading, it seems that the cost of providing tracks and the profit margins from them are slender enough often to make giving music away the only worthwhile option.

Also links to Free Albums Galore, mostly featuring obscure bands, but also hosting the likes of a Smashing Pumpkins album that Virgin had refused to release.

In reaction to the Smithsonian’s recent deal with Showtime, Design Observer discusses the “erosion of fair use and the public domain in America.” It’s nice to see a carefully reasoned essay on this subject on a design blog, as many graphic designers’ knee-jerk reaction to IP reform is to complain that professionals are invariably going to get ripped off.

a breakthrough for the creative commons: the cc licenses are now finally available in (simplified) chinese, with some help from renmin university. the enablers and constraints on its diffusion process and to what degree these will be ‘culturally’ influenced will be a fascinating development to watch itself unfold in the coming period.

We believe that the major music labels are using deceptive business practices and stealing legal rights from consumers. They cripple more and more new CDs with digital rights management technologies. In the most egregious case, Sony infected millions of computers by installing malicious, hidden software (a “rootkit“) onto Windows computers of users who merely inserted a Sony music CD.

I have to publicly admit that, even though I am the one pictured, I deserve little credit for the protest. FreeCulture Swarthmore students organized it; I just showed up.

I guess I was the most menacing presence. As noted in the article, I “embarrassed” the other students and pissed off the Tower Records management.

This is just further proof that, for a group dedicated to information policy wonkdom , FCo sure is good at landing earned media.

It is always good to remind ourselves from time to time why we do the things we do. Why we get angry about issues of copyright, why censorship is problematic, etc. Why we care about, what this website calls ‘a healthy information ecosystem.”

“More people come to see that yes, we are in new reality. Core insight about the structure of the net come clear. We can connect with whom we want, if only they want to connect with us. We can build structures in the net out of software that make connection productive and fun. People who like to connect like to share. People who like to share like to trust. The net provides us ways of doing this, ways that are interesting and powerful. In the battle of good and evil rhetoric strucures the game. It plays like poker, with rhetorical chips, stacked in story strength.

The force is that will draw us forward toward the expressions of free culture Jimbo describes is evolution determined by the architecture of cyberspace. In an environment that facilitates sharing, those who learn to do it well will have competitive advantage. We are building self-sustaining software structures that facilitate aggregation of shared value. We can build more, with near boundless aspiration.”

Those who like to connect like to share. Those who like to share like to trust. Principal foundations of a healthy information ecosystem.